Computer demos should not be confused with the demo versions of
commercial programs. They are "demos" too, but the word "demo" in
this text means a program whose purpose is to present the technical
and artistic skills of its makers and produce audiovisual pleasure
to the viewer. A computer demo usually includes various kind of
real-time produced computer graphics effects which have little
relation to each other accompanied by music. In a way a demo could
be described as a sort of music video or a short computer animation
film without a plot or message other than just "hey, I can do this"
and "greetings to my friends". Of course there is exception to
every rule and some demos have a plot and message. An important
distinction between demos and movies or videos is that the visual
effects seen in demos are real-time calculated,
instead of rendered in beforehand like conventional computer
animations (where often hours of computer time are spent to
calculate just one frame).

Most computer demos are freeware, in other words they can be
freely copied, but the original author retains copyright to the
product. The authors computer demos don't usually release the
source code and thus the demo programmers must figure out by
themselves how to produce a certain demo effect, leading to many
similar looking demos ("I can also do it!"). People who have never
seen computer demos or who don't understand the creation process
behind demos, often find computer demos quite boring. Computer
demos are made for other other people interested in demos, to win
fame and glory among other demo freaks. Nowadays the motivation to
make demos is often a price to win at demo competitions.

Demos are usually a group effort. The most important member of a
demo group is usually the coder (programmer). Demos are
conventionally programmed in
assembler, but nowadays
C and
C++ are
also popular, and only the most time-critical parts of the demos
are programmed in hand-optimized assembler. The original ideology
of the demo programmers is to build everything from scratch
(instead of using existing programming libraries) and push the
hardware to its limits and beyond it. E.g. many C64 and Atari ST
exploit bugs in hardware which allow some interesting effects e.g.
to draw graphics on screen borders (overscan / full screen). The
sound of chips of C64
(SID) or
Atari ST
(YM2149) are not designed
to play samples,
but still demo coders have managed to do this. Demo effects are
usually non-interactive, which allows demo coders to hand-tune
routines to do exactly-what-is shown and not worry about anything
else. Whereas game programmers must use more general purpose
routines and include interaction. Demo coders often use clever
tricks and actual cheating to make things look better than they
really are. In addition to the coder, there is usually a musician
and a graphician (graphics artist) and contact personnel (swappers,
SysOp). One person can of course takes care of several of these
duties and there can be several programmers, musicians etc.
Typically a demo group has 2-15 members, but there are several lone
wolves in the demo scene.

People who are interested in demos are called the demo scene.
Organized demo scene began to form on the mid-1980's. During those
early days the most popular demo machines were
Commodore Amiga,
Commodore 64 (C64) and
Atari ST.
Apple Macintosh was never a popular demo platform.
The first
PCs usually had poor graphics and sound
capabilities. Since emergence of
VGA graphics and
Adlib/SoundBlaster sound
cards allowed a good demos to made on PCs, but it took many years
for PC scene to learn to program these well.
The ST scene began to diminish
after the first years of 1990's and the PC demo scene began to
rise. Nowadays the PC is the most popular demo machine. C64 and
Amiga demo scene are still existing. Yes, some people still make
demos for C64, but nowadays it is more of nostalgic curiosity.

The demo hobby is centered in Europe, there are little demos
makers in other continents Majority of leading demo groups come
from Northern Europe. Finland could perhaps be titled as the
leading demo country, because Finns have gathered more winning
positions on major demos parties than any other country. The
Scandinavian countries have more demo freaks per capita than other
countries.

It is difficult to estimate the actual size of demo scene, but
there are at least several thousand people in Finland who are
interested in demos.

Demo scene members organize big meetings, called demo parties.
They usually last few days and contain so much different kind of
events that the attenders rarely get a good night's sleep. People
go to demo parties to meet other demo scene members, swap software,
play multi-player network games and watch and attend to various
kinds of competitions. The best competition
entries are usually rewarded with prices: money and computer
products from sponsors.

On big demo parties the number of entries for a competition can
be very large. A small jury consisting of scene members first
reviews the entries and a limited amount (e.g. 10-15) entries are
shown to the big audience. Often entries get disqualified because
they have broken some competition rule or they contain material
which offended the organizers or they don't work in the organizers'
computers.

They gather several thousand visitors, but there a lots of smaller
demo parties which gather only few hundred visitors. The average age
of people who attend demo parties is getting younger and younger each
year, now it is about 15-16 years, but the average age of those people
who win competitions is usually slightly above 20. The youngest demo
scene members are about 10 years of age and oldest ones are around 30
years of age. The demo hobby is even more male-oriented than other
computer use. Almost all demo scene members are men. There has been
some female musicians and graphicians, but I have never heard of a
female demo coder. Major demo parties have few percent of female
visitors, but most these women are girlfriends of male demo scene
members or local girls who just wandered there, because of free
entrance. Women often get free entrance, where as boys have to pay
100-250 FIM ($15-$40) to enter a demo party.

Demo Competition

The winners of this competition usually get the best prices
(compared to other competitions), so in a way this is the "king of
competitions". There are different categories for different kind of
home computers, e.g. separate Amiga and PC demo competitions.

Intro Competition

The difference between a demo and an intro is the size of the
programs. The maximum allowed hard disk space for demos is usually
4 megabytes, but for intros to limit is usually only 64 kilobytes
(40 kilobytes for Amiga intros). Assembly'94 was the first big demo
party have a 4 kilobyte intro competition. Nowadays there are even
more extreme intro competitions e.g. 256 byte intro competition.
The smallest intros are always coded in assembler. It is more
difficult to get lots of high quality graphics and music and
different kind of effects to small size. The smallest of intros
(<= 4 kilobytes) usually don't have any kind of music, because
the (stupid) competition rules have disallowed them.

Left: Inside of a gourad-shaded torus from "Cyboman 2"-intro
by
Complex
(Winner of The Party'94 PC intro competition), Right: A
vector world from "Airframe"-intro by Prime (Winner of Assembly'94
PC intro competition)

Graphics Competition

This is the competition for still images, usually limited to
some size (e.g. 640x480 pixels) and amount of colors (e.g. 256).
The subject of picture is free, but the most popular ones are
fantasy, science fiction, horror and semi-nude or nude women. Rules
allow only self-drawn images to enter the competition, but still
often the majority of the winning pictures have cleverly borrowed
elements from photographs and existing fantasy paintings.

There is often a different category for computer generated 3D
graphics, often called the ray tracing compo.

"Space Tits" by Danny (Winner of Party'95 graphics
competition). The woman on the left is copied from a photo of Cindy
Crawford.

The No-Copy?-Page - an excellent graphics compo picture gallery
featuring pictures which are copies of existing ones (the site
is down)

Animation Competition

Animations are different from demos, because they are rendered
in advance, where as most of the visuals in demos are calculated in
real-time. Animations are usually made using some commercial 3D
animation package, but some people use normal video or hand-drawn
animations. The most popular subjects are "rides" (flights in
space, chases etc.), various fights and humor.

Music Competition

Music competition is often divided into different categories
e.g. 4-channel
MOD-formats (Protracker),
multichannel (max. 32-channels) and C64 music competitions. The
number of channels
tells how many instrument sounds can be used simultaneously. There
length of music file is often limited to about one megabyte and
only maximum of 3-4 minutes of the song are played (but the song
can be longer).

The choice for music style is free, but majority of songs are
similar to techno, euro dance or funk. Music competition usually
gathers more entries than any other competition. In big demo
parties this can mean 200-300 entries. Some demo musician are now
making music for commercial games or producing commercial dance
music.

The first Amiga, Atari ST and C64 demos were short intros
(introductions) made by cracker groups
(people who removed the copy protection) which were presented
before the game started. The word "intro" has
nowadays a different meaning. The early demos and intros usually
featured some picture, music and a scrolling text. The scrolling
text usually contained information about the makers of intro and
greetings to their friends and people who they respect.

Soon the demos were so large that they contained many "screen"
with different kind of effects and music. People often called them
megademos. The word "megademo" indicates that the size of demo is
about megabyte, but soon it started to mean a any multi-part
demo.

On Amiga megademos were usually sequential - one screen/effect
follows another. The user could sometimes skip a part by pressing
the left mouse button. The rigid non-interactive design allowed
the demo makers to synchronise music with the screen effects.
The best examples of this are the Amiga demos by Spaceballs,
"State of the Art" and "9 Fingers" which featured
motion-captured video sequences combined with various graphical effects.

On Atari ST the megademo screens were often
made by different demo groups and thus having no resemblance
between each other. ST megademos usually had a main menu screen,
where you could select which part of the demo you wanted to watch.
The main menu was often designed like a computer game e.g. in the
Union, Mindbomb and
Decade megademo the user controlled a character
with joystick and selected different demo screens by manovering the
character over a door. In 1991 megademo "Ooh Crikey Wot a
Scorcher", the user was controlling a space craft, which was flying over
a 3D landscape. Many of the ST demos featured
hidden screens and
reset screen (screen started when you pressed the reset button on
the machine).

PC and C64 demos accepted the Amiga-like sequential style of
demos with little or no interaction. In mid-1990's most Amiga and
PC demos were full of 3D effects. First there was wireframe 3D,
then filled 3D, then flat-shaded 3D, then gourad-shaded 3D, texture
mapped 3D, bump-mapped 3D, environmental-mapped 3D etc. The 3D
objects were usually quite simple: a rotating cube, torus, space
ship and duck are one of the most popular ones. The 3D world of
demos is usually static/lifeless as opposed to 3D game worlds,
which are full of action. Many people soon started to consider
these "pure" 3D demos boring and new kind of demo designs emerged:
moving lights and white noise was added to screen. The screen was
flooded with text messages, but instead of early demos, which had
long scrolling texts, these were short messages. More and more
effects were combined together.

So far the demo scene hasn't evolved from concentrating on
technical excellence instead of content and maybe this is one of
reasons why the demo is slowly dying away. Most PC demos are still
made for DOS and because of this they don't take fully advantage of
today's hardware (e.g. 3D accelerators), instead they still rely on
old VGA or SVGA standards via VESA 2.0. If the main point of
watching demos was to see something "cool" which wasn't possible to
do in games, the point is now gone, because state-of-the-art games
for Windows using cheap 3D accelerator cards blow current demos
away.

Many old demo scene are nowadays involved in making computer or
video games (including the author of
this document). The production of computer games involves many similar
skills which are needed to make good demos.

The "golden years" of demo scene (1987-1996) are gone, but I am
sure we will still see some interesting designs from demo
scene.